Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last week’s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

  • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
    8·
    2 hours ago

    Go home Coursera, you’re drunk.

    Want to get even better results with GenAI? The new Google Prompting Essentials course will teach you 5 easy steps to write effective prompts for consistent, useful results.

    Note: Got an email ad from Coursera. I had to highlight the message because the email’s text was white-on-white.

    How the chicken fried fuck does anyone make a course about “prompt engineering”? It’s like seeing a weird sports guy systematize his pregame rituals and then sell a course on it.

    Step 1: Grow a beard, preferably one like that Leonidas guy in 300.

    Step 2: If your team wins, never wash those clothes, and be sure to wear those clothes every game day. That’s not stank, that’s the luck diffusing out into the universe.

    Step 3: Use the force to make the ball go where it needs to go. Also use it to scatter and confuse the opposition.

    Step 4: Ask God(s) to intervene, he/she/they love(s) your team more!

    Step 5: Change allegiance to a better team if things go downhill, because that means your current team has lost the Mandate of Heaven.

    That will be $200 please.

    • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      3 hours ago

      Thanks, Google. You know, I used to be pretty good at getting consistent, useful results from your search engine, but the improvements you’ve made to it since the make me feel like I really might need a fucking prompt engineering course to find things on the internet these days. By which I mean something that’ll help you promptly engineer the internet back into a form where search engines work correctly.

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    7·
    4 hours ago

    Jingna Zhang found an AI corp saying the quiet part out loud:

    In a previous post of mine, I noted how the public generally feels that the jobs people want to do (mainly creative jobs) are the ones being chiefly threatened by AI, with the dangerous, boring and generally garbage jobs being left relatively untouched.

    Looking at this, I suspect the public views anyone working on/boosting AI as someone who knows full well their actions are threatening people’s livelihoods/dream jobs, and is actively, willingly and intentionally threatening them, either out of jealousy for those who took the time to develop the skills, or out of simple capitalist greed.

    • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      3 hours ago

      I thought the Raytheon ads for tanks and knife missiles in the Huntsville, AL airport were bad, but this takes the whole goddamn cake.

      • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
        5·
        3 hours ago

        Raytheon can at least claim they’re helping kill terrorists or some shit like that, Artisan’s just going out and saying “We ruin good people’s lives for money, and we can help you do that too”

        • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
          5·
          2 hours ago

          Grift tech that claims to do awful shit that ruins everyone’s lives, but really just makes Stanford grads sit around pretending to invent something while funneling VC money directly in their bloodstreams.

          You’d think these would overflow the evil scale and end up back into being ethical but really they’re just doing the same thing as the non-vaporware evil companies with just some extra steps.

        • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
          5·
          3 hours ago

          Right? At least it the knife missile does what it says on the tin.

          Apologies in advance for the Rick and Morty reference, but Artisan seems to be roughly congruent to “Simple Rick” candy bars.

          The (poorly executed) distillation of the life’s work of actually talented and interesting people, sold as a direct replacement, to fill a void that the customer doesn’t even know exists.

  • veganes_hack@feddit.orgEnglish
    9·
    9 hours ago

    Zuck says lots more slop coming your way soon

    “I think were going to add a whole new category of content which is AI generated or AI summarized content, or existing content pulled together by AI in some way,” the Meta CEO said. “And I think that that’s gonna be very exciting for Facebook and Instagram and maybe Threads, or other kinds of feed experiences over time.”

    Facebook is already one Meta platform where AI generated content, sometimes referred to as “AI slop,” is increasingly common.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      2 hours ago

      Ok so I read the thread as translated by google. Some notes:

      1. System was set up to also use some image recognition so it could filter for some classic incel-type shit, like:
      • believers
      • zodiac sign written
      • doesn’t work
      • show breasts in photos
      • photos with flowers
      1. His entire correspondence with these women was done by chatgpt. including making dates and promising gifts for those dates. He later gives gpt calendar access to avoid a two dates to the prom situation.
      2. Did he continue using gpt to talk to his fiance? yes. Did he feign responsiveness in his texting with gpt? also yes. When she started talking about going to weddings, did it generate a marriage proposal out of the blue, and prompt him as to whether or not the message should be sent? also yes.

      just… fuck.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      15 hours ago

      The entire motivation of AI dev afaict is to have a new mommy to take care of you, I guess this is one way to do it. 🙄🙄🙄

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
    10·
    20 hours ago

    Fortune magazine reports:

    In separate investigations completed by the blockchain firms Chaos Labs and Inca Digital and shared exclusively with Fortune, analysts found that Polymarket activity exhibited signs of wash trading, a form of market manipulation where shares are bought and sold, often simultaneously and repeatedly, to create a false impression of volume and activity. Chaos Labs found that wash trading constituted around one-third of trading volume on Polymarket’s presidential market, while Inca Digital found that a “significant portion of the volume” on the market could be attributed to potential wash trading, according to its report.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      16 hours ago

      Wait we created a market and people are manipulating it in order to profit because it turns out market manipulation pays the same or more than being a banker investor “superpredictor” but is much easier?

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    13·
    24 hours ago

    Amazon used an AI-generated image as a cover for 1922’s Nosferatu, and it got publicly torn apart on Twitter:

    On a personal note, it feels to me like any use of AI, regardless of context, is gonna be treated as a public slight against artists, if not art as a concept going forward. Arguably, it already has been treated that way for a while.

    You want me to point to a high-profile example of this kinda thing, I’d say Eagan Tilghman provided a textbook example a year ago, after his Scooby Doo/FNAF fan crossover (a VA redub came out a year later BTW) accidentally ignited a major controversy over AI and nearly got him blacklisted from animation.

    I specifically bring this up because Tilghman wasn’t some random CEO or big-name animator - he was just some random college student making a non-profit passion project with basically zero budget or connections. It speaks volumes about how artists view AI that even someone like him got raked over the coals for using it.

    • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      2 hours ago

      Unfortunately it’s the small artists who are most open and vulnerable to criticism. Amazon can probably impose this kind of shit on everyone through sheer persistence

    • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      20 hours ago

      What do they mean by “in color”? If it’s just various tints throughout the film that’s normal and cool. If they mean full on colourised that’s messed up.

  • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
    17·
    2 days ago

    Had a first-hand AI encounter today at the grocery store. The self-checkout now has a script that monitors an overhead video feed to make sure you’re not getting tricky about what scanned and what got put into the bagging area, and if it thinks you’re shady it will stop you from proceeding and summon an employee with no notification that something is wrong.

    The new self-checkout process is as follows:

    1. Scan your item
    2. Hold the item plainly before you so the overhead camera doesn’t get confused, looking like a Catholic priest about to deliver communion.
    3. Place item in bagging area. Try not to have to shift things around to find a place.
    4. Swear as the nom-mutable voice instructions tell you to bag “your… Item.” Legitimately feels like they got as far as assembling the voice lines before anyone realised that having the compu-checker read every purchase out loud would lead to at best an unworkable cacophony if not several immediate lawsuits.
    5. GOTO 1

    Even as antisocial and impatient as I am I’ve found self-checkout to be a UX disaster, but somehow it keeps getting worse.

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      8·
      1 day ago

      sometimes i manage to confuse self-checkout overhead camera by having a bike helmet on, when that happens i have to hold it up over bagging area (but not put inside because weight won’t match)

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
    18·
    2 days ago

    Sundar Pichal, Google Q3 2024 earnings call:

    We’re also using AI internally to improve our coding processes, which is boosting productivity and efficiency. Today, more than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI, then reviewed and accepted by engineers. This helps our engineers do more and move faster.

    Firstly, if this is literally true they’re completely fucking cooked.

    Secondly, if it isn’t, what version of it is?

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      2 days ago

      Best case scenario they are using a loose definition of AI to mean any code generated by other code in order to signal to investors that google isn’t the hulking, sluggish monolith that it is and is agile enough to use AI.

      Worst case scenario: “hey chatgpt pls write me new search algorithm to print money, thanks, sundar”

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
      14·
      2 days ago

      from someone on Mastodon:

      Google has a gigantic code generation culture, because the engineers there strongly prefer complexity to drudgery.

      If you asked them to write fizzbuzz and left them in a room for twelve hours they would deliver a new programming language that generalized repetitive string printing, with an extension language for potential non-string-printing actions.

      I left in ‘22 but feel fairly confident that “25% of code generated by AI” is going to be more of the same.

        • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
          9·
          1 day ago

          God knows I like a good DSL, but “complexity over drudgery” just sounds miserable. I also wonder what kind of stuff they’re coding that’s supposedly trivial enough to be generated by AI.

            • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
              9·
              1 day ago

              Here ya go boss, a 80% prototype solution.

              /* TODO: support other element types */
unsigned int * maxsumsubarr(unsigned int arr[], size_t len, size_t * sublen) {
        *sublen = len;
        return arr;
}
      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        2 days ago

        I half want to jest “PDD strikes again” but honestly it feels like only half the explanation

        (promotion driven dev)

        • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
          8·
          2 days ago

          Man now I’m thinking about AI written PIPs. God if I got an AI PIP I’d self immolate on company grounds.

          • self@awful.systemsEnglish
            8·
            2 days ago

            oh this is almost definitely real, given that the regular PIP process was already designed to get you to quit

    • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      2 days ago

      Firstly, if this is literally true they’re completely fucking cooked.

      I totally believe it. Y’all remember Stadia? That was a cosmic freebie and Google absolutely dropped the ball on it so laughably hard.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        1 day ago

        which part of it was the freebie? whole service looked dead on arrival to me (for the simple reason of physics)

        • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
          4·
          1 day ago

          At least for me in the US, performance was very good. I was able to 100% Sekiro, for example.

          The reason I think it was a freebie is:

          1. Everyone was stuck in-doors about six months after launch
          2. Everybody wanted to play videogames, but no one could get GPUs and the console situation was not great
          3. Cyberpunk 2022 2077 came out and tons of people wanted to play it. It ran terribly on consoles and on PCs, but surprisingly well on Stadia at launch

          It may have still failed altogether anyway, but the fact that they didn’t seize this opportunity, and instead stuck by their absolutely confusing-as-fuck “like Netflix but not really; first let me explain how this works” subscription model, always gets me.

          Edit: Cyberpunk 2077 🤦🏻‍♂️

          • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
            7·
            1 day ago

            but the fact that they didn’t seize this opportunity

            honestly, I think they did try, and ran into the unfortunate reality of physics

            to make that product work, you need reliable high throughput (this is helped by codecs), sufficient juggle-able GPU space (this is helped by being a gear-hogging first-in-line monopolist), and lastly the casual little requirement of actually being close enough to your customer base

            iirc US cost to coast latency is around 65~70ms (so 2x that is the upper timebound for player interactivity, obvs there it’d be less because more local DCs though). just from me to europe is 165msec+, with a far less predictable path throughput. the scale economics to launch a DC for this in ZA (even to serve subsaharan africa all the way up to kenya) just plain doesn’t work, and there are many more places in the world where it doesn’t

            it’ll be interesting to see if a retrospective as to why it failed leaks out of that biz someday

  • self@awful.systemsEnglish
    10·
    2 days ago

    a quick interest check: I kind of want to use our deployment’s spare capacity to host an invite-only WriteFreely instance where our regulars can host longer form articles

    …but WriteFreely’s UI is so sub-optimal the official instance (write.as) runs a proprietary fork with a lot of the jank removed, and I don’t really consider WF to be production ready out of the box.

    we can point the WF backend at arbitrary directories for its templates, page definitions, and static assets though, so maybe I could host those on codeberg and do a CI job that’d pull main every time it updates so we could collaboratively improve WF’s frontend? it’s not a job I want to take on alone (our main instance needs to take priority), but a community-run WF instance would be pretty unique

    the pros of doing this are that WriteFreely at least seems to have very slim resource requirements and it’ll at least reliably host long form Markdown on the web

    the downsides are again, it’s janky as fuck (it only supports Mailgun of all things for email, but if you disable that the frontend will still claim it can send password reset emails… but it’ll check the config and display an error if you click the reset link??? but they could have just hidden the reset UI entirely with the same logic??? also I don’t like the editing experience), and it’s not really what I’d consider federated — it shoots an Article into ActivityPub whenever you post, but it’s one-way so replies, boosts, and favorites won’t show up from ActivityPub which makes it feel a bit pointless. there might be a frontend-only way to link a blog post to the Mastodon or Lemmy thread it’s associated with on another instance though, which would allow for a type of comment system? but I haven’t looked much into it. write.as just has a separate proprietary service for comments that nobody else can use.

    this definitely won’t replace Wordpress but does it sound like an interesting project to take on?

  • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
    9·
    2 days ago

    for the love of beebo can i just get like eleventeen seconds pls where i dont have to put up with the sociopathy that is academic cs